Liquid Telecom increasing VSAT capacity

With all the fibre trenching Liquid Telecom does in Africa, it’s easy to assume the company’s products are all around fibre. You couldn’t be further from reality. Even though the city and highway trenching is what is easy to see, Liquid is still very active on the satellite front. For obvious reasons really; fibre is nowhere near reaching every corner of the country, even in the next dozen years – it is simply too expensive to connect everyone no matter where they are.

There have been some key developments in as far as satellite is concerned – first is that it has built a satellite hub at Teraco’s vendor-neutral earth station in South Africa. Second, and just announced by a supplier of theirs, is that Liquid is increasing the satellite resources they lease from one of the world’s largest satellite providers, a french based company called Eutelsat Communications. The reason is that there’s actually an increase in demand for VSAT (cheaper VSAT we’d add) from clients that include national parks, remote area offices, mining companies, and ofcourse NGOs.

This being a regional capacity thing, we still hope there will be some noticeable price changes in the VSAT offering that Liquid (or ZOL) will avail locally.

You can read the full announcement on the Wall Street Journal here.